3 minutes
Steven Stapp supports leaders in their development—especially those with internal initiative.
Mentoring is a two-way street, insists CUES member Steven Stapp, president/CEO of $1.1 billion Unitus Community Credit Union in Portland, Ore. He speaks from experience—in his 15 years as a credit union executive, he has taught and advocated for more than a dozen staff members who are now senior executives and at least one CEO.
Stapp’s a dedicated mentor, but he shoots down the notion that today’s CU leaders are talent scouts—spotting, teaching and graduating future leaders. “A future leader has to show ambition and ask for opportunities. They can’t wait to be discovered.”
That attitude is made evident by Unitus Community CU's willingness to place people of ability into jobs they don't yet know so they can broaden their experience, even though they may be less productive as they learn new team dynamics and how to apply their skills. But successful leaders can step up to the challenge, Stapp says.
“If they bring their passion, desire to succeed, fresh perspective and leadership skills to the position, they’ll pretty quickly start to show results.” Career development is an investment on the part of the CU, he explains, but it’s an investment that should show a good return.
Stimulating ambition is a smaller problem today than it was a generation or two ago, Stapp reports. Today’s able young women and men “expect to move up much faster than I did. Young people—women especially—once had to be encouraged to think big. Now I’m more likely to ask them to be patient,” he explains. “You need to succeed at each career step or project opportunity. The impatient ones need to understand that.”
The ladder starts with learning the guts of credit union operations and ends with executive training in leadership communication and coaching, he explains. Unitus Community CU hires an executive coach to work with members of the executive team, sometimes in groups and sometimes one-on-one.
Stapp often decides whom to send to upcoming conferences by asking staffers to write a two- to three-page paper explaining why they think they should go to specific events and what they want to learn.
He’s working with several executives who have expressed an interest in being CEO. “My job is to ensure they get ready for that next step through individual development, conference training and networking, and to provide challenges that will allow them to grow and develop their personal brand,” he says. “When the time is right, they will be ready to walk through that next door, and I will continue to be an advocate for them like many have done for me.”
Leadership that worked well in the 1980s and pretty well in the 2000s won’t necessarily cut it in the 2020s, Stapp emphasizes.
“Successful leaders in the past focused on management and control, which served us well when the challenges were coping with growth, finding efficiencies and dealing with economic ups and downs. Successful leaders now will have to be more collaborative and agile, but many of the same tools still work—thinking, learning, planning, motivating, organizing, measuring. Our job is to give young people the tools and let them figure out how to use them.”
Richard H. Gamble is a freelance writer based in Colorado.
